


The Once and Future Surgeons

by gayfranzkafka



Category: MASH (TV)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-17
Updated: 2021-02-17
Packaged: 2021-03-12 04:41:38
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,709
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29504277
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gayfranzkafka/pseuds/gayfranzkafka
Summary: Hawkeye walks into the mess tent one day to find B.J. hunched over some huge book, a look of concentration on his face. Setting his plate down on the table next to B.J.’s, Hawkeye pokes B.J. with his fork. B.J. nearly jumps out his skin.“Hey, Hawk,” he says, closing the book; its cover faces downward, so Hawkeye can’t see what it is.“Whatcha got there?” Hawkeye says. “You’re not holding out on me with some particularly juicy new medical book, are you?”To Hawk’s surprise, though, B.J. doesn’t take Hawk up on his joking tone; instead, B.J. just shakes his head. “Something from Peg,” he says.“Well, what is it? Some new mystery novel?” Hawkeye asks, making a grab for it even before the question is really out of his mouth.“No, it’s—“ B.J. says, trying to tug the book back from Hawkeye and not succeeding.“The Once and Future King,” Hawkeye says, turning it over. “Huh.”“It’s a new telling of the King Arthur myth,” B.J. says.“What the hell did she send youthatfor?”“That’s what I’m trying to figure out,” B.J. says.
Relationships: B. J. Hunnicutt/Benjamin Franklin "Hawkeye" Pierce
Comments: 5
Kudos: 66





	The Once and Future Surgeons

**Author's Note:**

> [This tumblr post](https://woolstation.tumblr.com/post/643255162376503296/hawkeye-and-bj-each-have-aspects-of-lancelot-and) made me briefly insane.

Hawkeye walks into the mess tent one day to find B.J. hunched over some huge book, a look of concentration on his face. Setting his plate down on the table next to B.J.’s, Hawkeye pokes B.J. with his fork. B.J. nearly jumps out his skin.

“Hey, Hawk,” he says, closing the book; its cover faces downward, so Hawkeye can’t see what it is.

“Whatcha got there?” Hawkeye says. “You’re not holding out on me with some particularly juicy new medical book, are you?”

To Hawk’s surprise, though, B.J. doesn’t take Hawk up on his joking tone; instead, B.J. just shakes his head. “Something from Peg,” he says.

“Well, what is it? Some new mystery novel?” Hawkeye asks, making a grab for it even before the question is really out of his mouth.

“No, it’s—“ B.J. says, trying to tug the book back from Hawkeye and not succeeding.

“ _The Once and Future King_ ,” Hawkeye says, turning it over. “Huh.”

“It’s a new telling of the King Arthur myth,” B.J. says.

“What the hell did she send you _that_ for?”

“That’s what I’m trying to figure out,” B.J. says. Some look passes across his face, one that Hawkeye can’t quite read.

“Well, is it any good?” Hawkeye says.

“It’s interesting,” B.J. says. “There’s a part where he talks to trees that I really liked. The whole first book, really, is pretty captivating. It sort of made me wonder if maybe she thought I could read it to Erin, when she was a little older. When I get home. But now that I’m onto the next book, I’m not so sure.”

Hawkeye raises his eyebrows. “What, he’s falling for Guinevere now, and his passions are less than chaste?”

“Not exactly,” B.J. says, but then he fails to elaborate.

“Well, let me know how it is,” Hawkeye says. Normally, he’d ask to read it—hell, normally, he’d have ripped the whole first chapter right out from the spine by now. But something about how B.J.’s acting about it, the weird way that he’s got his guard up, leaves Hawkeye unsure he wants to press the issue just yet. Still, he can’t help feeling curious, almost jealous, about this book that B.J.’s wife sent him. He decides he can wait a while, though, and see if B.J. decides to tell him more without prompting.

A few weeks pass, and B.J. finishes the book without being really sure just why Peg sent it to him. Part of him almost wonders if it’s the world’s most oblique “Dear John,” letter, but that would make him King Arthur, and B.J. can’t quite picture himself in the role. Besides, in White’s telling of it, it’s not just Guinevere who Lancelot seems to have his eye on, although B.J. doesn’t _think_ Peg could have intended for those passages to resonate with him quite the way they do.

But what _did_ she mean by it? Over the next few weeks, the question drives him nearly to insanity. For some reason, he can’t settle on a simple, “She wanted me to have something to read” explanation. For one things, it’s not really the sort of novel either of them tends to go for. For another, something in the book seems to reach out and _grab_ ahold of B.J. when he reads it, and he can’t think it’s pure coincidence. He drives himself to such distraction over it that he nearly considers waking Radar up to get Peg on the phone. However, even for B.J., it’s a bit much to picture Radar being privy to his bedraggled demands that Peg tell him just _what_ she meant by sending him something to read in the mail.

Eventually, after a few more days of wondering without coming to any conclusions, he leaves it on Hawk’s bed for him without great ceremony. He knows Hawk’s probably been dying to read it—pretty much any book that comes through camp is as good as gold, even if one wouldn’t have given it a second look back home—but the thought of handing the book over to Hawk, looking him in the eyes and saying, _Here, I think you’d like this_ (or, even worse, saying, _Please read this and tell me what you think_ ) is somehow too intimate for B.J. to bear. So instead he leaves it, unspoken of, when Hawk is out on a shift. (Or maybe with a woman. B.J.’s not quite sure, but he’s not letting himself think too hard about it.)

B.J. tries to stay up till Hawkeye makes it back to the tent, but a long week of surgery means he finds himself falling asleep to an empty tent, despite his best efforts. The next morning, he wakes up late, and sees Hawkeye lounging in his own cot, book cracked open to the first chapter or two. There’s a few seconds in between B.J. waking up and Hawkeye noticing that he’s awake, and B.J. makes greedy use of them. He just takes Hawkeye in, pretending that there’s not six feet of space between them, pretending he could lean over Hawkeye’s shoulder and see just what sentence, exactly, he’s reading, that he could tousle his hair and kiss him good morning and—

“Heya, Beej,” Hawkeye says, looking up from the book. B.J. tries not to blush.

“Morning,” he says. “Late night last night, huh?”

“I was playing doctor,” Hawkeye says, and B.J. feels something tighten in his chest, before Hawkeye adds, “And I guess I did a good job of pretending. All the patients made it through the night,” in a tone that suggests he really was in Post-Op.

“That’s good,” B.J. says, then pauses. He’s torn between wanting to get breakfast with Hawkeye and not wanting to interrupt his reading. He’s still got the odd need to know just what, exactly, Hawkeye will think of the book.

But Hawkeye is already putting it down and standing up, saying, “Well, I’m starved. If you’d care to accompany me to the mess tent, then maybe I can find something that’ll make me lose my appetite.”

“Sounds good,” B.J. says.

They don’t talk about the book at breakfast, or at lunch, or for a good few weeks. B.J. wants to ask Hawkeye about it, but something holds him back, and Hawkeye (for once) doesn’t offer up his opinion unprompted. B.J. finds himself imagining ways to bring up the book, feeling, somehow, that he needs to find some excuse for it. As though it would be odd to ask a friend’s opinion on a book they’ve both read. In the end, he doesn’t have to settle on a particular pretense; it’s Hawkeye who brings it up first.

It’s a Saturday night, and Charles is on duty, so they have the swamp to themselves. They’ve been drinking, but maybe less than is usual for them. Only enough for the night to have a slight glow about it, for B.J.’s thoughts to somehow feel clearer to him than they do sober. He’s sitting on his bed, and Hawkeye on his own, and B.J. leans across the distance to ask Hawkeye something (about fireflies, of all things—he’s never seen them, being, as he is, from the West Coast), when Hawkeye says, “I finished it.”

“You finished what?” B.J. says. “The gin?”

“The book,” Hawkeye replies.

“Oh,” B.J. says. “Oh. What did you think?”

Hawkeye leans back a little. “I thought it would end with his death.”

Out of all the things B.J. was expecting Hawkeye to say, that wasn’t it. “Oh?” he says. After so long of wanting to talk about this book, he suddenly doesn’t know where to begin.

“I always read those things and think it’ll turn out different, you know,” Hawkeye says. “The whole last long while, I just kept waiting for Arthur to do something different. I was so sure he was going to find a way to fix it, even though I knew what was coming.”

“Really?” B.J. says. “I almost couldn’t get through to the end. It all felt so… trapped, to me. Claustrophobic. Especially with Merlin. The way he was travelling back through time. It felt almost cruel. A reminder of just how much none of them could do any different, because there was the myth before there was even them, because everything they were destined to do had already happened.” As he says it, he feels that familiar tightness in his chest, something that’s grown more and more common, something which he does his best to ignore. B.J. hadn’t even really know he felt this way until he started talking, but now he finds himself almost too overwhelmed with to continue speaking.

Hawkeye, though, says, “Really? That’s not what I thought at all.”

“No?”

“I thought… there was something almost freeing about it. I liked Merlin living backwards. You know, he’s almost us, in a way. Or we’re all Merlin. Or something.”

“What?”

“Well,” Hawkeye says, “the only thing he knows, at first, is the legend. The myth. Arthur is this… he’s history that got turned into myth, or myth that got turned into history. Some kind of story. That’s all he is. But there’s almost an excavation, to the way White told it, in my mind. Everything is happening both ways, right? As we’re reading that he’s pulled the sword out of the stone, Merlin is watching it go back in. Merlin’s watching Lancelot unlearn his name, just as we’re watching them fall in love.” _Did he just say what I think he said?_ B.J. wonders, but Hawkeye says it so easily, and then keeps talking, that B.J. seconds guesses himself.

Hawkeye continues, “That whole book, even as I was watching the story wind Arthur tighter and tighter, till there was no escape, I thought, _Well, somewhere, he’s becoming a little boy again. Somewhere, he’s becoming who he was before the story got told._ And it ends, too—we know what’s coming, but it’s not there yet. And it’s after the story, or in between the story, or—I don’t know, but we heard him tell it to Malory, and then we see the moment between what gets written down. Before what comes next in the myth. The cracks in the story, where he’s not quite sure how it all fits together. Where he’s just a man again. There was some sort of grace in that, to me.”

B.J. _wants_ to feel what it is Hawkeye’s saying; maybe that’s why he wanted him to read the book in the first place, in the hopes that Hawkeye would find a way to tell the story that made it hurt less. But now, sitting here with those words coming out of Hawkeye’s mouth, B.J. can’t seem to find a foothold in what Hawkeye’s saying, can’t seem to find a way into feeling it himself.

“I don’t—but _we_ aren’t living backward,” B.J. says. “ _They’re_ not living backward. It’s all—it’s all forward, into the myth, the myth that he _tells_ him before it’s even happened. How is—how is that not trapped? How is that not—he doesn’t get un-crowned, he doesn’t get un-married, he doesn’t—“

B.J.’s getting worked up to the point where he doesn’t even really register that it’s happening anymore, where it’s something almost automatic, something almost outside of himself, that’s happening, or maybe _he’s_ outside of himself, and it’s happening anyway, but in any case he doesn’t know where this came from, or how to stop it, or—

Until Hawkeye is next to him, in the cot, hands on his shoulders. “B.J.,” Hawkeye says. “Hey. Look at me.” B.J. looks at him. “You’re not trapped, okay? I know it feels like—it feels like we all are, right now, but you’re not going to be here forever.”

Hawkeye’s hands on him are enough to calm B.J. down. “I wasn’t—I was talking about the book,” he says, looking away. “And besides, it’s not—the war is—that’s not what I was talking about.”

He can feel Hawkeye’s eyes on him, intense, even as he studiously looks out through the mesh of the tent, into the darkness beyond it. “Un-married,” Hawkeye says. “You said unmarried.”

“I don’t know what I was saying,” B.J. says, still not meeting his eyes.

“You—why did you leave that book for me?” Hawkeye says. “Why did you want me to read it?”

B.J. shrugs. “It was a book. I would’ve left any book for you. It’s something to do.”

“That’s not—that’s not it, with this, one, is it?” Hawkeye says.

“It—it’s a present from my wife, Hawk.”

“Yeah,” Hawkeye says. “That’s the other thing. Why’d she send it to you?”

B.J.’s been waiting for the answer, almost hoping Hawk would give it to him, but now that the question’s been asked aloud, he wants to un-ask it. B.J. closes his eyes, pictures how it must feel to go back in time. To take the book off Hawk’s bed. To un-read it. To un-meet Hawkeye, and then un-meet Peg, and then un-meet himself, or at least the version of himself that he’s become.

“What are you thinking?” Hawkeye says. Maybe they’re drunker than B.J. thought, because they never say shit like that. They never ask outright.

“I’m un-making myself,” B.J. says, eyes still closed. “I’m trying to live backwards.”

“Let me come with you,” Hawkeye says.

“What?”

“I’ll come with you. I’ll unstitch those kids from surgery yesterday, but it’ll be okay, because they’ll go back to the fields they came from to have all their organs put back into place. And I’ll un-lose my regulation uniforms, and un-slouch—“

“I think you were born with a slouch,” B.J. says, smiling.

Even though he’s still got his eyes closed, he can hear Hawkeye smiling, too, as he replies, “Hey! Watch your mouth.”

B.J. waits a moment longer, expecting more of this un-telling of their lives, and the war, but Hawkeye is silent. B.J. opens his eyes. Hawkeye is looking at him very carefully now.

“What do you want?” Hawkeye says, softly.

“What?”

“You want the moon? I’ll lasso the moon,” Hawkeye says, a little bit of Jimmy Stewart in his voice, but only enough to let him ask something all his own, because then he drops it and adds, “You want to forget this whole thing? I’ll help you forget it. I’ll walk backwards from now till the rest of time, I’ll paint the sun into the sky so that it rises in the West and sets in the East. I’ll unwind bandages and I’ll tell the punch lines first and I’ll send your letters back home, but only if you promise me you’ll stop when we get back to the day we met. If I could have that, just that day, I can give up all the rest, but as trapped as we are, I can’t unwind it completely, because then that unravels not just the war, and the death, and—it unravels us. We’re wrapped up in this thing. And I’m selfish. I can’t help it. I can’t help feeling that it’s going to turn out different this time.”

“I—“ B.J. says, sure, now, that Hawkeye is saying what he thinks he’s saying. _Us. We’re wound up in it._ “I don’t want to unwind it all, either. Just most of it. I… in the book—he loved him from the moment he met him. Lancelot, when he met Arthur. That was part of the tragedy, too, wasn’t it? It wasn’t just Guinevere.”

“It wasn’t just Guinevere,” Hawkeye says. “That’s the thing. It goes backward, and forward, and all kinds of sideways. What way do you want me to tell it? I’ll tell it anyway way you want to hear. I’ll even—I’ll even—“

“Stop talking,” B.J. says, and he’s smiling, and Hawkeye is smiling, and then, what comes next—it isn’t something that can be told.


End file.
